A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann Read Free Book Online Page A

was holding a big black umbrella in her right hand. The boy stood a little apart from her. He was wet and inadequately clad in a cap, a hoodie, and sagging jeans. Between them on the ground were a black suitcase and a yellow nylon bag with the logo of a Swedish soccer team. The woman and the boy were both staring in the same direction, to the left, as if their gaze could impel the bus along the road.
    Erika saw the two figures as she drove past them. At first she thought that she was just imagining it, that the boy and the woman were a ghostly vision created by the rain, the dark sky, and the perpetually changing light. But when she looked in the rearview mirror to confirm that it
was
her imagination, they were still there. The woman under the black umbrella. The boy with the hoodie, soaking wet. The suitcase and bag on the ground.
    Erika pulled over to the side of the road. She switched on the hazard lights and grabbed her anorak from the backseat and threw it around her shoulders. She opened the car door, got out to face the driving rain, and tried to attract the attention of the woman or the boy. They just stood there, unmoving, staring the other way.
    “Hey there! Hello!” she shouted. “Hey there, you two!”
    The woman with the umbrella turned toward her. Erika broke into a run. The boy still did not move. He was listening to music; a thin white cord ran from his ears to his jeans pocket. The woman looked inquiringly at Erika, who was wet and freezing cold and out of breath after her run along the road.
    “You looked as if you’ve been waiting awhile,” said Erika.
    “The bus should have been here ten minutes ago,” said the woman.
    The boy had now realized that his mother—for the woman with the umbrella must be his mother, thought Erika—was talking to someone. He took out his earbuds so he could hear better.
    “Where are you going? I mean, can I give you a lift part of the way?” asked Erika. “You’re drenched,” she said when neither of them responded. “And the bus definitely isn’t coming.”
    The woman and the boy regarded her as if they didn’t really understand what she was saying. Erika switched to Swedish.
    “Especially you,” she said, nodding to the boy. “You’re absolutely soaked.”
    The boy shrugged his shoulders and looked at his mother.
    “We’re going to Sunne,” the woman said. “Are you going there?”
    Erika was heading for Örebro, to stay at a nice hotel, eat good food in the hotel restaurant, and get a decent night’s sleep before the long drive to the ferry terminal the next day; everything had been planned in accordance with Laura’s instructions.
    Sunne would mean a detour of at least eighty kilometers.
    “Yes, I’m going to Sunne,” Erika said.
    And why not, she asked herself as she hurried back through the rain with her anorak over her head to the parked car and its flashing lights, followed by the woman and the boy with their luggage. The boy, who was about the same age as her own son, was wet and cold, and their bus hadn’t come, so why shouldn’t she drive them to Sunne?
    “Do you live there? In Sunne?”
    Erika turned up the heat and gave the hoodie boy in the backseat a towel that she had stuffed into her rucksack just before leaving home.
    “Yes,” said the woman.
    The boy had put the earbuds back in his ears. He was listening to music only he could hear and staring out the window. He had big brown eyes and an emphatically etched mouth that stretched from cheek to cheek. Yes, he reminded her a little of her boy, of Magnus. Perhaps because of his tall, slim body (huge hands and feet) well hidden in baggy clothes, or the finely chiseled face that could equally have been a child’s or an extremely young man’s, depending on the light and the constantly changing expressions.
    She looked at him in the rearview mirror and tried to catch his eye. She wanted to give him a smile. She wanted to say: I’ll drive you all the way home.
    “How old is your